Boris Evelson

Vice President, Principal Analyst Serving Application Development & Delivery Professionals

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Boris serves the Application Development & Delivery role. He is a leading expert in business intelligence (BI) — a set of processes, methodologies, and technologies used to transform raw data into meaningful, useful, and action-oriented enterprise information. Boris delivers strategic guidance, helping enterprises define BI strategies, governance, and architectures and identify vendors and technologies that help them put information to use in business processes and end user experiences.

Boris' current research focuses on the practical and actionable best practices for building BI infrastructure and applications, such as BI business cases, architectural options, organizational structures, and vendor selection. Boris continues to explore emerging trends in next-generation BI, such as agile BI architecture and development approaches, in-memory analytics, advanced data visualization, convergence of structured data and unstructured content analytics, process-driven and operational BI, and many others.

Previous Work Experience

Boris has more than 30 years of experience with enterprise software and applications implementation, management consulting, and strategic advisory skills. Most recently, Boris was a managing partner at Textra, a boutique strategic advisory firm serving all IT constituents: users, vendors, and investors. Boris cofounded Textra after spending several years as a VP and a strategic technology advisor at JPMorgan/LabMorgan, where he led many successful internal BI initiatives, advising the bank's large enterprise software clients on enterprise adoption issues and product and marketing strategies. Prior to JPMorgan, Boris served as a senior manager of data warehousing and customer relationship management (CRM) practices at PricewaterhouseCoopers. Boris started his career at Citibank, where, among many other successful projects, he implemented the bank's first global credit risk data warehouse.

Education

Boris holds a degree in music education from Moscow Gnessin School Of Music, Russia.

Print Bio

Boris Evelson

Vice President, Principal Analyst Serving Application Development & Delivery Professionals

Read Boris's blog posts

Previous Work Experience

Education

Boris holds a degree in music education from Moscow Gnessin School Of Music, Russia.

Research Coverage

Boris Evelson's Research

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For Application Development & Delivery Professionals

REPORT: The Three-Part Guide To BI Modernization

Vision: The Business Intelligence Playbook

December 4, 2018Boris Evelson

A single, on-premises, enterprise business intelligence (BI) platform, based on a single enterprise data warehouse and a single data integration platform, is an unattainable dream — and a thing of the past. Customer and market demands require multiple Agile BI options to deliver insights when the business demands them, not when your technology team is ready to deliver. This report makes recommendations to application development and delivery (AD&D) pros working on BI initiatives on how to modernize BI architecture for greater agility and faster application delivery.
For Application Development & Delivery Professionals

REPORT: Upgrade Your BI Data Architecture For Agile Insights, Part 1

The Three-Part Guide To BI Modernization

December 4, 2018Boris Evelson

The three-tier "layer cake" business intelligence (BI) architecture based on ETL, an enterprise data warehouse, and a BI tool is inflexible and outdated. This report, part one of our BI modernization series, gives recommendations to application development and delivery (AD&D) pros working on BI initiatives on how to upgrade their BI data architecture with the latest technologies for greater agility and faster application delivery.
For Application Development & Delivery Professionals

REPORT: Get Faster And Better Insights From Your BI Tools, Part 2

The Three-Part Guide To BI Modernization

December 4, 2018Boris Evelson

A single enterprise business intelligence (BI) platform that only targets descriptive and diagnostic analytics applications is a thing of the past, especially for large enterprises. This report explains why application development and delivery (AD&D) pros working on BI initiatives need to upgrade to modern BI platforms that offer machine learning capabilities, integrate multiple BI platforms into a BI fabric environment, and include other relevant BI technologies for greater agility and faster application delivery.
For Application Development & Delivery Professionals

REPORT: Move BI To The Cloud To Achieve Greater Agility, Part 3

The Three-Part Guide To BI Modernization

December 4, 2018Boris Evelson

An on-premises, single-tenant business intelligence (BI) platform is inflexible and outdated. This report makes recommendations to application development and delivery (AD&D) pros working on BI initiatives to modernize their BI environment by migrating it to the modern elastic cloud architecture for greater agility and faster application delivery.
For Application Development & Delivery Professionals

REPORT: The Forrester New Wave™: Natural Language Generation For Analytics, Q4 2018

The Nine Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up

November 28, 2018Boris Evelson

In Forrester's evaluation of the emerging market for natural language generation (NLG) for analytics, we identified the nine most significant providers in the category — Arria, Automated Insights, AX Semantics, IBM, Marlabs, Narrative Science, Salesforce, SAP, and Yseop — and evaluated them. This report details our findings about how well each vendor scored against 10 criteria and where they stand in relation to each other. Application development and delivery (AD&D) professionals working on analytics projects can use this review to select the right platform for their NLG requirements.

For Application Development & Delivery Professionals

REPORT: Topic Overview: Business Intelligence

November 21, 2008Boris Evelson

Business intelligence (BI) is a set of methodologies, processes, architectures, and technologies that transform raw data into meaningful and useful information. It allows business users to make informed business decisions with real-time data that can put a company ahead of its competitors. Traditionally, core features like reporting and analytics have been the focus of BI technology choices, but as those features get commoditized, a whole new set of possibilities has emerged. Forrester's BI research shows that the technology is evolving and that enterprises on the cutting edge of these new trends can gain competitive advantage in their industries.
For Application Development & Delivery Professionals

REPORT: The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms, Q3 2008

July 31, 2008Boris Evelson

In Forrester's 151-criteria evaluation of enterprise business intelligence (BI) platform vendors, we found that IBM Cognos and SAP Business Objects maintain their leadership positions, while Oracle and SAS Institute move into leadership positions in enterprise BI thanks to the richness of their functionality, ability to scale, and the completeness of their corporate and product vision and strategy. Actuate, Information Builders, Microsoft, MicroStrategy, SAP, and a new entrant, TIBCO Spotfire, came out as Strong Performers following very closely on the heels of the Leaders, offering very respectable alternatives and a multitude of choices for information and knowledge management (I&KM) professionals. New entrants to this Forrester Wave™ evaluation of enterprise BI platforms (though not new to the market) are Panorama Software and QlikTech, who, while lacking the breadth of features to qualify them as single, large-enterprise BI solutions, are reputable Contenders. In some very specific BI use cases, they even outperform the Leaders.
For Application Development & Delivery Professionals

REPORT: The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms, Q4 2010

IBM Cognos, SAP BusinessObjects, and Oracle Lead, With Information Builders, SAS, Microsoft, and MicroStrategy Close Behind

October 20, 2010Boris Evelson

In Forrester's 145-criteria evaluation of enterprise business intelligence (BI) platform vendors, we found that IBM Cognos, SAP BusinessObjects, Oracle, Information Builders , SAS, Microsoft, and MicroStrategy led the pack because of the completeness of not just BI, but overall information management functionality. Actuate came out as a Strong Performer on the heels of the Leaders offering equal — or in some cases superior — BI functionality, but it mostly relies on partners for the rest of its information management capabilities. TIBCO Spotfire also came out as a Strong Performer offering top choices for analytics, even surpassing other Strong Performers in the overall information management arena based on its traditional strength in middleware and application integration. Last but not least, QlikTech and Panorama Software moved up from Contenders and into the Strong Performers category based on the continuous improvements in their analytical capabilities.
For Application Development & Delivery Professionals

REPORT: Quantify The Tangible Business Value Of BI

Business Case: The Business Intelligence Playbook

January 10, 2018Boris Evelson, Martha Bennett

This report guides application development and delivery (AD&D) professionals working on business intelligence (BI) initiatives through the maze of BI business case categories and typical BI ROI components, and it identifies areas where quick wins are possible. This is an update of a previously published report; we revised this edition to factor in the latest findings from Forrester's Q4 2016 Global Business Intelligence Business Case Online Survey.
For Application Development & Delivery Professionals

REPORT: Build An Agile BI Organization To Support The Insights-Driven Culture

Organization: The Business Intelligence Playbook

November 2, 2017Boris Evelson

An insights-driven organizational culture is key to enterprise success and competitive differentiation, and Agile business intelligence (BI) is one of the required foundational components to make it successful. This report dives into the people part of the Agile BI tetrad — Agile BI software development, organizations, processes, and technologies. It provides an organizational framework that describes how application development and delivery (AD&D) professionals working on BI initiatives can align their BI organization for agility. This is an update of a previously published report; Forrester reviews and updates it periodically for continued relevance and accuracy. We revised this edition to factor in new data from Forrester's Q4 2016 Global Business Intelligence Organization Online Survey.